


mortalis stella

by AnimaEl



Category: Fate/Grand Order, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, F/M, possibly one-sided romantic feelings, solomon spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-08 09:11:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17383769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnimaEl/pseuds/AnimaEl
Summary: He was as bright and as distant as a star.When he left, he burned out like a supernova——and left a gaping hole in place of his presence.





	mortalis stella

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own the uh copyright to the title. I just took it off the manga because it fits Roman to a T, even tho they probably use that title for that exact reason, ha ha.

Unassuming.

That's what she had always thought.

Roman had been the definition of it. Fluffy hair, a love of sweets, a doctor. A single thirty-something otaku who had gasped and spluttered indignantly when she barged into his playing-hooky place.

Harmless, absent-minded, leisurely. _Cute,_  she had thought, watching him eat a slice of strawberry shortcake with gusto, a spot of cream dotting his cheek. There's an air of innocence in him that wasn't normally present in middle-aged men. It makes her want to hide him, keep him safe and happy and protect him before the world diminishes that spark left inside him.

It's a wonder that he's still single. First meeting, and she wanted to keep him to herself already.

She had thought, if Mash could have Fou with her, maybe she could have the doctor too.

They both gave out the aura of an endangered fluffy animal, after all.

***

Mash fitted into her life like a piece of puzzle that was meant to be there.

He fitted into her life like he had always been there all along.

He's easy to get along with. He's easy to tease, easy to talk to. Easy to trust. Easy to feel comfortable with. Easy to smile to.

Easy to love.

Easy, easy, easy.

...

... Easy to take for granted, too.

***

It was as if his entire existence has been tailor-made to make people drop their guard around him.

Clumsy, sheepish, naïve.

Back then, she hadn't realised that those characteristics were as genuine as they were fabricated. How they were born from an earnest wish, turned into a defense mechanism at the very same moment.

_That day, I saw the world burn._

Those words, it haunts her.

***

She dreams about him, sometimes.

When she does, it seeps into her waking moments, traces the shape of his shadows in the things he left behind. His coat, his mug, his computer. His Magi*Mari figurines. His stash of sweets he never got to eat.

In Mash, in the way that she handles the glasses he gave her carefully.

In Da Vinci, when she heads to the medical bay and stays there just because.

In her, in the way her universe feels like it has fallen out of its orbit, an absence in where her center of gravity had once laid.

Those days, she curses how easily he had become an irreplaceable fixture that makes up the existence of one Fujimaru Ritsuka only to dissipate so abruptly.

She regrets a lot, and she hates it.

***

He takes up a lot of space in her mind.

The thought of him snags around the tangled branches of her frustrations, pushes itself out to the forefront of her mind, and stays there.

It doesn't take no for an answer, and she is terribly weak. So she stops trying.

So she thinks. Of him, of his life. Of his beginnings and his end.

She thinks about him being Solomon. She thinks about his wish. She thinks about what freedom means to him.

She wonders whether his life as Romani Archaman had been sufficient for him in its simplicity, in how it had gave him a purpose to follow and a fear that had chased after him for fifteen years.

She wonders if it could be called freedom, after all.

***

He really did do his name justice, at the end.

She just wishes that she could've told him her feelings out loud, when they had the time.

Maybe it's best that she never did.

After all, it would've been cruel to dangle such things in front of a man living on borrowed time.

***

...

She still wants to, though.

**Author's Note:**

> After the last fic I realized that I hate ao3's section divider with a surprising amount of passion so I'm just gonna stop using that.
> 
> Feedbacks and any comments gushing or crying about Romani would be welcome because I need to talk to more people about this and maybe cry together lmao.


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